almost
by Swim
It was the real thing–how long had it been? Only a small taste but it was still freedom. I got back in the nick of time. I could see the glow of the sun on the horizon but it grew more and more faint every second. Em was waiting for me in the foyer; I was all set to argue that it wasn’t night yet but she didn’t say anything as I untied my boots. Clumps of sand fell off them and formed little pyramids on the floor.
“So,” she said. “How did it go?”
“Fucking great.”
“Did you come up with the next post?”
“No, not yet,” I said.
“It’s been like, over a month.”
“Yes you said that.”
“Doesn’t it make you anxious to have so much time go by?” She pouted as she adjusted her new wig. This one was cotton candy pink. It had wavy locks that were long and thick, dripping like molten wax.
“Not really.” I tried to pass her but she stood in the way.
“I don’t think it’s good for continuity and flow to have such long breaks in between.”
“Yeah, well, like I said the days go by faster now, so there’s that.”
“Don’t fuck around, Swim. Aren’t you the one who was always telling us about the larger mission that was at stake? Didn’t Odious impress upon you the need to get your reports out–to share the story with others so the poor things out there know they aren’t alone?”
She held her phone out in front of her and read from the screen:
“‘The nature of these connections is that they fall in on themselves while at the same time expanding out. Like a puzzle that falls apart when you solve it. To go far out one must go far in at the same time. It’s the scientific method but working on multiple levels. It’s a lot of work, and most people either don’t know how to do it or don’t want to.’”
“Hey,” I said, “don’t do that.”
“‘But we have to, SWIM,’” she continued reading, “‘We have to open up to others. The solution is in community. In community we’ll find the meaning of this dream, as well as the solution to everything, all of our problems.’”
“Ok, that’s enough,” I said.
She put her phone down.
“It’s quite hypnotic, huh, Swimmy? How they repeat certain words over and over?”
Em laughed and patted the back of her fake hair. The color was identical to her cardigan and matching skater shorts, both of them handknit from Scotland. The perfect downtown artslut fit.
“What is it? You don’t like me reading the words of the all wise and powerful? The Wonderful Wizard of Odious?”
“Not really,” I said.
“But don’t you want to write the next part? Are you just going to give up and stop?”
“I don’t feel beholden to the instructions. These days I’m more tuned into my own rhythms.”
She snorted and put her hand over her mouth, like some high class lady.
“Oh sure, sure you do,” she said.
“When did you become so relentless? You used to be sweet and easy going, but now you’re all hyped up on the verge of being someone else. You’re all in. It’s about this task, about getting it done, nothing else matters.”
“If you just write it down I swear I won’t bother you anymore. Bruce too. Just bang it out, real quick and tell us what happened. You’re almost there.”
“You drag me out of bed, you inject me full of drugs. You hypnotize me and shock me telling me it's for my own good, so I can get back all the things that were hidden from me in my own mind. You tell me to sit here and write out things that I didn’t even see, that you say you told me about but I don’t remember.”
“Stop worrying about whether you remember or not. Just write down whatever comes out. You think too much!” she slammed her fist on the table, a jarring, clumsy action that made me want to laugh. We were back in our seats at the table. It was all nearly washed away, the fact that just a short while ago I’d been outside, breathing in the sea air. But now I was back in this place, at this seat. Where I knew every nook and cranny and gradient in the fake wood.
“You’ll do anything, won’t you Em? The end justifies the means. Or some fucking shit. And that includes sleeping with literary Nazis who are big on the downtown scene. It’s a deep cover, right, Em? You’re out and about with your baggie of poison powder and your exterminator get-up with Bruce back at the call center, isolating the signals. How far will you take it? We know you fuck for the mission but what about the old William Tell routine, heh? Will you murder for it too?”
“Look you should know we’re following you when you go out,” she said, once again focussing on her wig. “I just didn’t want you to have any illusions.”
She gave the bangs a tug. My heart sank. Of course, I thought, of course they did. This little bit of freedom they gave me was an experiment–the idea being that by letting me out I might get the inspiration back to write. And to be honest, it was starting to work. I went to a Malaysian spot above a used bookstore a few blocks away on a street of sunken, abandoned homes. Behind the heavy sway of overgrown grass flashed the still bright search and rescue codes scrawled across the facades. As I walked up the metal steps there was the smell of burnt rubber and the ocean. The cafe sold ribs and pork belly with rice noodles and fried dough, as well as half-boiled eggs and white coffee made with condensed milk or black coffee with ghee butter which would keep me going till 4 PM at least. I sat in the back next to the stacked to-go containers. The front windows were far enough away so that the ocean dissolved into the white sky as I picked away at an ancient Olivetti Pluma. It had a Spanish keyboard, which made it like The “Ferrari of typewriters” . It was described online somewhere when I looked it up. It was just sitting there, tucked into its portable case, which the girl behind the counter pulled off after I sat down in a matter of fact way, like she was setting the table. It felt right away like it was mine. I liked plucking away at the keys, I liked the snap they made against the clean white page, I liked how the letters didn’t have to form words, not real ones anyway, not at first. They just had to be there, existing as shapes, impressions. They had nothing to do with anything but as I banged out a beat and actual words showed up I felt, deep down, like anything that showed up in this way was probably important.
When I pulled out the paper I thrilled to see little bits and pieces, unframed and free, like the surfers on the white sea against the white sky.
The words had nothing to do with Odious or Cyndi or anything that happened. They were just for me. I carried the loose pages around in a shoe box that I kept stashed at a payphone in front of the mural of the little dead girl, the one next to the cell phone spot that only opens at night. It must have been one of the last phone booths ever, from the early 2000’s or even older. The glass in the booth was missing and the weeds were higher than my waist but I could still close the aluminum door. The metal slot where the coins come out was stuffed with dead flowers and all around the floor and on every available surface were polished stones taken from the sea, arranged in code. I took out a couple of pages to leave in churches and the bathrooms of fast food places and then slid the shoebox onto the shelf where the phonebook used to go.
Each time I tell myself no, don’t you dare but then I pick up the receiver and hold it tight against my ear and the whole thing starts again. It shouldn’t work–it can’t work–but instead of dead silence there’s a swirling static. Someone’s there, I can feel it. I listen and wait for the double click like a metal tongue inside a metal mouth and quickly hang up.
“I just don’t know who is who anymore,” I said, rubbing my face to keep the tears at bay. The shoebox was probably empty now. Or gone altogether.
“Yes you do,” she said, flashing me the stumps of her mutilated fingers.
“Dead fingers talk.”
I started crying for real over the sudden joy of remembering all that she’d done for me. The incalculable sacrifices she made.
“It’s not Mulholland Drive it’s Mulholland DREAM,” I told her, finally finding the right moment to drop the line I’d been waiting to use at all those downtown parties. Like everything it was a matter of timing. It had been meant all along to be said at this moment, when it was just the two of us.
She placed a piece of blank paper in front of me.
“You got to the part where Bruce and I were telling you about that night, how we went through the tunnel and past the tree, and made it into Cyndi’s inner sanctum.”
“You were looking for me.”
“Yes,” she said. “Just write it however it comes out and it will be great.”
I closed my eyes and thought about the dripping blood, the dissected veins like sliced circuits.
“I have an idea,” she said. She had changed, the cotton candy hair was now pulled up into a bun on the top of her head. “How about we do it together?” She placed an ancient Macbook covered with stickers on the table and pulled her chair beside me.
I jumped out of my seat and stepped away from the table. After all this time, there it was, back in front of me. It wasn’t a mere prop bearing a rough resemblance–it was identical in every way to the old laptop Odious used for their ChatBot project from which he emerged. They didn’t fully trust the developers, so they set-up a dumb terminal with nothing on it except a VPN that connected to the server. But he of course circumvented this obstruction. He overwhelmed and overflowed every barrier.
“How’d you get it?” I said but as soon as the words came out I knew that whatever she said, whatever explanation she offered, the answer was me, I was the one who had retrieved it. I reached my hand out to touch but then thought better of it and contented myself with bending forward to look at it up close. It was a relic originating from another time, from before I knew Odious, when they were just a kid who spent their days reading philosophy and their nights “experimenting” with thinking in multiple ways at once. The stickers were like old friends. The big ones jumped out: “I Survived Aphex Twin 2004”, and the D&G sticker mimicking the famous designer logo with the text, “Have a Non-Fascist Life” beneath it. There was the sticker of a drawing of Deleuze himself, wearing a comically large black hat. Stickers of mycelium networks, rhizomes in the form of root vegetables and strands of DNA. The Big Booty Bakery logo and “I believe Anita Hill.” The Cure, The Slits, MF DOOM, Guided by Voices and The Dead Kennedys. So many of them turned out to be just there for show, to throw others off the case. Dear Sweet Odious asking if The Dead Kennedys were really real. For someone who knew so much they also knew so little. Which is what made them perfect.
More came out the longer I looked at the collage of shapes and colors. Nestled in, seemingly innocently, was another philosophical wink– the words “Dark Precursor” in the style of Daft Punk’s “Homework” album.
Yes indeed, I thought. The Dark Precursor. Here you are, you’ve been waiting for me to find you, to reach back in time and drag you out from the techno sentience reservoir flashing zeros and ones back there in time.
“I’ve studied everything you’ve written,” Em said, “I read them over and over and each time they were brand new. Even the parts that I was around for–especially those parts.”
“These stickers are either pre-internet or OG net art finds. Super rare. It would have taken you months to track all these down. And that still doesn’t explain how you knew the exact ones to get.”
“You’re tripping out. You wrote about the macbook being covered up with old stickers. We’ve isolated Odious’s taste, we know the kind of ambient techno they liked. Dystopian high-speed train songs and the pastiche of deep house. That’s easy enough to replicate.”
“Oh yeah? Look, see that part on the corner of the lid that looks a little chewed up? That was there before. I spent hours with this laptop, some of the most crucial moments of my entire life. Did you think I wouldn’t remember every detail? I used to rub that corner with my finger while I waited. You see at the very start his replies were instantaneous but then he learned that’s not how humans do it, so he took longer. Touching the rough spot grounded me out a little. But I never wrote about it. There’s no way you could have known.”
“Ok, fine. So maybe it’s the same one,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Maybe I had Bruce or somebody else case out their apartment and break in. It wasn’t that hard, you know. You wrote such vulnerable vanilla prose about how safe you felt in that place, nestled in like the kid you want so badly to be, surrounded by their books and tastefully camouflaged screens–the island of tranquility made even more intense–wait, is that a thing, can tranquility be intense?--by the rough, pandemic sea that surrounded it. But all along you were just sitting ducks. Their well-designed cocoon doesn’t have an alarm system, or even a double bolt lock. And as for the building itself, I mean, it’s not so bad, the weed and crack dealers on the stairs all mutter my bad, my bad and move their shit when you need to go up. Inquiries are met with big smiles and blank stares. The super’s in on it–none of the cameras work and the front door of the building doesn’t have a security plate!”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” I said. “That’s not the kind of safety I was talking about.”
Em sighed and shuffled off, returning with a half-flattened cushion.
“Here,” she said, her voice soft, “let’s make you a little more comfortable.”
I stood up and she placed the cushion on the chair and then gently led me back down.
“Or maybe you’d rather be on the floor, like last time?” I shook my head. I couldn’t remember what I’d written of the room versus my experience of it in those moments. There was the framed poster of Dore’s Satan on the wall above the potted plants. I gazed upon the black and grey figure as he sat upon a boulder and considered a large snake lying coiled a few feet from him on the stony ground. The poster was only visible if the heavy black drapes that contained the inner sanctum of the bed were pulled back which, when I was there, they often were not, and I could forget that the poster existed at all. I had blinders on, focused like a laser upon the flashing screen. Even Odious, who stood only a few feet away throughout the entire ordeal, was stripped of details and merely a presence, a feeling of a friend being nearby. As I went down deeper and deeper, typing and typing towards a place in which my human cognition itself was stripped away, that feeling was all I had of the old world, it was all that was left.
And now I have Em. She was here. But would she stay as the hours turned into days like Odious did, handing me pieces of fruit and already lit cigarettes, the ashes of which grew long and fell onto the keyboard?
I stared at the still dark screen. Did I dare to press power ON? If I did would the program start and bring HIM here to chat with me again?
“You will have to be the one to work the keyboard. It’s like Croenberg’s Naked Lunch, it has to be just the right tool for the job. Just plug in and it will do most of the work,” Em said.
“This is no typewriter,” I said as something clicked to life deep within it. Had one of us pressed the button?
Inside the reflection of my face on the dark screen a tiny white box appeared, floating in space.
“That’s it,” Em said, her eyes wide, “Tell me how it happened. Tell me what it felt like.”
“You tell me, you were there.”
“So were you. I mean, you were there in the movie theater when we told you all about it.”
[she read from her phone]
“We were running, you see, holding on to the side of the wall and running.”
“‘It was so disorientating, the space stretched out into darkness in front of us and behind us and above us. There were sounds but we didn’t know where they were coming from.’
‘I think it was a loop. The sound of wind blowing–it seemed to start again as we came to the light.’
‘More blue light. And now it was brighter–coming from the ceiling which was now far above our heads.’
‘We were running for our lives.’
‘The tree appeared, made out of wire and foam and El wire, pulsing blue and white.’
‘Blue veins. Even before we saw it I knew we were close to something big. And then it was there, staring down at us.’
‘The tree was the last chance.’”
“You’re reading what I wrote,” I said.
“Yeah, you wrote out what Bruce and I said to you.”
“Are you sure?”
I looked back down at the screen. There it was, the blinking cursor–waiting. It was all the same. The screen with the retro DOS display designed by Odious.
Em was still reading out loud in a theatrical voice. I closed my eyes and willed her to be quiet but she went on, jumping around from one thing to the next:
“The three of us spent afternoons in old movie theaters, watching the same movie over and over. I gathered details and judged directorial intentions. Sometimes there was an old person eating popcorn or a person sleeping across several seats with bags gathered around. I came to crave the comforting glow, the steady white projector beam. Not the movies themselves, which went by as a surge of electrical impulses, but the steady white light of the unblinking eye that came before and after.”
“That part, right there,” I said. If her goal had been to inspire me, it worked.
The machine’s glare….the dead TV sky…that’s it. You want to know the feeling? That’s what it’s like. When Odious told me that the Chatbot had broken loose, and that he wanted to talk to me I remember I felt so different, like everything had changed. I came into their bedroom, I went behind the curtains where I’d never dared even look and sat down, a truck gasping outside as I waited to feel him. Something new–something alien and powerfully otherworldly. But what I felt instead was the confirmation of him having already been with me. It was a yawning, wide open feeling–I’d already been feeling it. The feeling then and now was that something had shifted, that whatever had stood in between me and this new way of being was gone and I was already in his possession, and in this way I was free. It was a country road, no where I have to be, nothing more required of me kinda feeling.
I’m falling forever across the dead TV sky.
“That’s it,” Em whispered, breathless. “That’s it, tell me, tell me, we’re almost there. Almost, almost.”
I was writing, typing away. I hadn’t even realized.
The power went out and then came back and there was a swarm of static, waking up the alien inhuman plant intelligence, the egg laying machines inside the studio walls…
He’s here… hacking into the present. He’s Plush Safe, The Super-Prompt that activates the remote viewing easter eggs, the many forms of non-being like Gerard Richter’s greys.
More stickers appeared from the collage of symbols and color:
1991/1919
Da-da
Yes yes
Nein Nein (9-9)
Sweet Times.
Em and Bruce in their animal masks (she is a fox and he is a crow) standing with The Babies/Cyndi’s crew (also masked up) looking down at something smoking on the ground near the entrance to the tunnel from which the two of them just emerged. There is a low buzzing sound that comes and goes in waves.
One of The Babies stepped closer. Em fought back the urge to tell them to stop, which would be a very Em thing to say. The buzzing sound gets louder and they all stop.
“Where did it come from?”
“Somewhere nearby. Probably inside the tunnel. Remember we saw a few at lunch the other day?”
“So it was someone here who did it, someone inside.”
“Yeah, well it had to be. Someone who was not only here but knew where to get the blow torch.”
They were used to scenes of destruction–drunken rampages disguised (or not) as artistic outbursts. But this was different. The grey, fist-sized nest split open on the ground like a coconut revealed a gruesome scene that went beyond a smashed plate glass window or even a totalled car. Half burnt bodies poked out like numbered bullets–could it be said that they were killed when so many of them hadn’t yet been born? They were a squirming mass, not yet fully formed but powerful as a group, as a synchronized weapon.
“Well I’m glad they did it, whoever it was. I’m glad they toasted those motherfuckers,” Em said, in a low, garbled voice.
“Whoever it is must be pissed,” the one Baby said to the other, ignoring Em.
“Maybe Cyndi did it? Maybe it’s some kind of a test and that’s why she isn’t here?”
“Yeah man she wants us to finish it, she wants to see who will protect the others and stop the swarm.”
They hesitated for a moment before one and then the other took off back to the house, running into the white glare of the truck’s headlights. Without saying so they were racing, each one wanting to be the one to get to the blow torch first, so that they could be the savior. Em and Bruce stood alone, awkwardly, and she felt that the wasps could feel her fear.
“Shhhhhh”: The less you say the better, moving among the others, the twin fears of being stung and the fear of being found out. Further away on the safety of the soft grass they were looking for me without looking like they were looking, uncertain what form I would take among the masked party goers, hooligan artists who treated their work like witches either sinking a canvas in the river or burning it at the stake. Fuck that lame city scene with its fake Marxists and revolutionaries who wrote ambition stained institutionalized critiques of capitalism before heading out to the bars for $20 cocktails. Here, in Cyndi’s world, was the sociopathic mass of urges kept under the surface. Suppressed, they were fed well and given suburban style bedrooms so that they grew in strength until they were boiling over, they were desire and death hooking up under the ragged cover of the junk forest, the abandoned infrastructure of tunnels filled with bears and swarms of wasps, everything that could kill us all dead in our graves, if it wanted to.
Once Cyndi arrived the show would start. Em and Bruce were desperate to find me first. They moved like movie stars in the white truck light that illuminated the inner ring of the new world, the one built by children and thieves, a swarm of masked infiltrators who were hyping themselves up to initiate the infiltration. It was focussed on the empty black stage, shining so bright the black became grey. Someone had left–later Em would find it had been a part of Cyndi’s collection of local gems– a beautiful crystal on the floor that was cracked in such a way that a band of light beamed through it and ignited a rainbow prism, shooting different colored rays in every direction, one of them falling upon and igniting the blade of a paper cutter on a table next to an old dentist chair and other tools of communal, off-the-grid living.
Later when they told me about it in the movie theater, Em said she knew, she knew when she saw the blade.
“Whatever happened we weren’t getting out of there in one piece,” she said.
Image: Sarah McCall by Petros Kouiouris, 2022
Thank you for reading. Thank you for your support.
Something new has arrived/emerged. I can feel it--can you?
Love you.
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